"By the beginning of the eleventh century the Normans had virtually completed the process by

which, in barely a hundred years, they had transformed themselves from a collection of almost
illiterate heathen barbarians into a civilised, if unscrupulous, semi-independent Christian state. It
was, even for so energetic and gifted a race, a stupendous achievement... But within a
generation or two... 'the national change was pure and general'. The same was true of language.
By 940 the old Norse tongue, while still spoken at Bayeux and on the coast (where the newer
immigrants presumably kept it alive), was already forgotten at Rouen; before the end of the
century it had died out altogether, leaving hardly a trace behind ." (p. 10-11)
A pre-occupation with law was a hallmark of most mediaeval societies of the West; but it
remains one of the paradoxes of Norman history that it should have persisted so strongly
among a race notorious for its lawlessness throughout Europe. (p.11)
... they were enormously prolific, which meant a continually exploding population. It was this
fact more than anything else that had brought the first immigrants from Scandinavia; and two
hundred years later it was the same phenomenon that sent swarms of land-hungry younger sons
still further south in their quest for Lebensraum. (p. 11) [Why were they so prolific? Are other
people so different or what? Where is the secret? S..]
... testimony of a certain William of Apulia who, at the request of Pope Urban II, produced his
Historical Poem Concerning the Deeds of the Normans in Sicily, Apulia and Calabria just before
the close of the eleventh century. (p. 12)
In 751 they [Lombards S..] were strong enough to expel the Byzantine Exarch of Ravenna,
after which Greek influence was limited to Calabria, the heel of Italy around Otranto, and a few
isolated merchant cities on the west coast, of which Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi were the most
important. At first these cities were little more than prosperous colonies of the Empire, but as time
went on they evolved into hereditary dukedoms, still fundamentally Greek in language and
culture, acknowledging Byzantine suzerainty and bound to Constantinople by close ties of
friendship and commerce, but for all practical purposes independent. (p. 14)
Calabria in particular was to remain, throughout the Renaissance, one of the principle centres of
Greek learning. (p. 15)
During the latter half of the eleventh century there lived at Monte Cassino a monk called Amatus
or, as he is sometimes called, Aime who between about 1075 and 1080 composed a history of
the Normans in the South... Unfortunately his original Latin text has been lost; all we possess is a
translation into an Italianate Old French made in the fourteenth century and now surviving as an
endearingly illustrated manuscript at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. (p. 16)